Our paper in Nature Communications suggests that sexual conflict could help explain an unusual aspect of human demography – women live longer than men, but are less healthy than men late-in-life. A role of sexual conflict in this “male-female, health-survival” paradox has, so far, been largely neglected. We wish to highlight how evolutionary theory might provide new insights into human health and that collaboration between evolutionary biologists, human demographers and biomedical scientists provides fertile ground for exciting new research.

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